Recipes are a general ideal set of cooking instructions for manual food preparation. Some recipes are written down on index cards for personal reference, or published in a cook book or even online for sharing. Even with the instructions, a novice cook can find it difficult, or at least tedious, to replicate the cooking process of a professional cook. It can also be difficult to consistently recreate personal recipes.
Existing cooking devices have only a basic level of automation. For example, a microwave oven cooks according to a programmed time at a programmed power level. A coffee machine can automatically brew a pot of coffee at a programmed time using water and coffee beans. However, none of these machines are able to operate in an intelligent manner. For example, these machines are unable to adapt to actual conditions during preparation. In another example, none of these machines are able to learn new recipes.
It is desirable to overcome these shortcomings. Therefore, what is needed is a robust autonomous cooking device to automatically prepare food. The device should use computer vision and machine learning to learn new recipes, and the device should adapt to sensor feedback in real-time during preparation. Furthermore, the device should be networked for retrieving and sharing or selling recipe files within an online community.